Inklings of a Problem: High School Social Awkwardness

I had known for some time that things in my life… weren’t working. At all. Anywhere close to what I saw people around me. Particularly around social situations, particularly around social situations involving sex. I felt extremely uncomfortable with sex jokes or sexual humor, especially when any form of humiliation was involved. I had a miserable time attempting to express interest in someone I liked; or to even interact with them in some ways. When I was a teenager, I thought what I later discovered to be being aroused by someone was instead them doing something to manipulate me.

I remember one incident vividly: I was a sophomore in high school. In the hallway one random day, this drop-dead gorgeous girl walks up to me out of the blue and asks, “Would you like to have sex with me?”

I froze.

I couldn’t

I couldn’t

oh dear god please ask me anything but that. anything. please.

I could not go there. It wasn’t about her. I’d grown up with “DO NOT HAVE SEX BEFORE MARRIAGE!” branded into my social-intellectual-being-space. I believed that if I had sex before I was married, I would be struck dead by lightening on the spot. I am not kidding. It was five or six years later before I had solid experimental evidence to the contrary, and that’s a story for another post. I also believed that sex was a burden for women and a tarnished, underground trophy-esque for male-bodied (wannabe?) alpha types — the same ones that had teased me in elementary school.

ah, she’s gonna want an answer soon…

And now I was being asked to court death, shame, and derision. Asked by someone I could have liked, if I knew anything about her besides that she was remarkably attractive and wore mostly black with a black hat. To this day I can’t remember anything else; after the question hit much of it was a blur. I never did get her name.

say something! quickly!

After what must have been an eternity for her and my mind somewhere between pedaling for all its worth to spin my wheels on a subject I was wholly unprepared to deal with, I had to say something. I had to get another angle, something that would give me something to hold on to, ‘cuz everything else was slippery and ineffective. I managed to yammer out,

“w-why?”

which from my perspective was an innocent question; from her reaction, it was clearly not something she expected. She turned and in frustration made a fist in the air and walked off in a huff. I felt an uncomfortable mixture of awful, relived, and like I’d just missed out on something I would never have a chance at again. I can’t imagine she felt any better. Now I can only grieve and send my compassion out into the ether while recognizing how totally unprepared I was for that moment.

That same year, another young woman — we’ll call her V — was gracefully more persistent, also made some very definite gestures toward me. She was more subtle, and I completely missed every single one. We rode the same bus to and from school during that first semester — oh yeah, my mom and all four of my siblings had moved out of our house with our dad in it, and moved into a rental house my family had spent the previous three years remodeling and renting. It happened to be vacant at the time which was gracefully convenient at the very time my mom decided to leave my dad because the situation had become unavoidably unsafe. This new living place was close enough to where V lived that we now rode the same bus (this was new).

Anyway, getting off the bus, she was right in front of me and I watched as she threw her books on the ground as she got off the bus. Why would anyone do that? I wondered in bewilderment, shook my head and went on walking home.

I was in the chess club at the time, one of the few social places I knew stability and held authority as I was First Board — top player on the team — and spent a lot of time that year teaching everyone else. In a sense, that’s where I was alpha; it was a meritocracy, and I’d spent the previous year playing the seniors who had the most skill, learning as much from them as possible. We often played during lunch, and she would come with one of her girlfriends (which one varied a little bit) and watch, or play chess with her girlfriend. I don’t recall much interaction between us then except that I made her an “Honorary Chess Club Member,” and that she responded positively. The Second Board — we’ll call him T — was a sarcastic bastard who was constantly a thorn in my side, particularly on this issue — kept accusing me of “trying to get V in the sack.” I wasn’t trying to get anyone in the sack and felt a not small amount of shame and discomfort at the constant accusation. If anything, she was trying to get me in the sack, and in some sense rightfully so. I did get this twinge in my body that I initially felt was something she was doing to manipulate me, and later discovered was my own biology manipulating me. Apparently it was mutual.

The 2nd semester of my sophomore year my family moved north. A long way north. An hour commute to get to the bus that takes 45 more minutes to get me to my same school far away. I tolerated it for a semester and that was about all I could take; giving up the chess team was hard. We were good, and everyone else in all our competitive schools that was good were graduating that year. Next year was supposed to be our year.

I am not and never have been a morning person. Getting up at Oh God Thirty to get to school way to early in the morning got to be too much for me and I switched to the local high school, which is ostensibly the reason that M — the man more or less committed to being my new stepdad — moved us all up there in the first place. Giving up the chess team was a huge loss. The new school had a chess team, but they didn’t have nearly the depth and talent I had at my old school. We faced them at the State competition; to win State was the holy grail. T’s team won state without me at first board; that’s how dominant they were. I trained them well. And I still beat T in our head to head match up :D

At the new school I did find and eventually join the Cross Country running team; T had been recruiting me for it hard in those days. (T is also one of those few people that live in the category of “more wiry than me”). In my junior year of High School I finally had to face the music of PE credits or not graduating. Gym class in elementary school had, most of the time, been an exercise in torture, cruel and unusual punishment, or both, and I’d successfully spent the last four years avoiding it as much as I could. Fortunately, participation in an after school sport was night and day different than being in gym class, also an experience worthy of a post for another day.

And of course school dances. And the awkwardness of asking someone to go. Probably the one person I wanted to go with the most was V, and I had her number — she wrote it in my sophomore yearbook — and I had what I recognize now as an intuition to call her and ask her to a dance, particularly in the latter half of the year. I had several opportunities when it came up. I did not act on any of them.

Later, as our Senior Year drew to a close, I found out she had gotten into Caltech, one of the schools I had applied to but missed. And on a semi-whim I called her to congratulate her, and during the conversation we agreed to meet. I showed her some of the partner dancing I was learning. This time I wasn’t quite so immobilized by what I was feeling and didn’t have to deal directly with the intellectual implications of what my body was telling me, which is that I very much liked being around her. We had a fantastic summer together rolling down hills, walking her Alaskan husky (who to this day remains the gentlest big dog I’ve ever met), playing head-to-head Tetris, and codebreaking. Her dad was Swedish, and she was very open about sex; even so I was still too tightly wound to go there.

My world about shattered one day when my mom offered out of the blue, clearly conflicted and with a weird mixture of emotions I’d never seen in her, to by us condoms. It’s a bit like a Cardinal suddenly doing a 180 on arguably the most vehemently held tenet of the Church. It was heretical, but it was coming from one of the arbiters of what was and wasn’t heresy. I couldn’t go there. “No, no, I’ve got this,” I blurted out quickly, once what she’d said registered. I’m not sure what was more discomforting: having my mom speak/act against the DNHSBM-death sentence, or the mixture of emotions that were happening in her background while she went there, notably a shaky determination, fear, some resignation; all behind a mask of stern resolve. It was also not something I was prepared for. I felt weird.

Still, there was a magical, transcendent quality V and I shared, even just being near each other. I remain grateful for our experience.

As the summer ended, I knew I was going off to Chicago and she was going to southern California. One thing I feared the most was that she would contact me one day, saying she’d met someone else and didn’t want to be with me… and so I preemptively broke up with her.

…which of course manifested the very thing I was most afraid of. I came back from my first semester of college extremely homesick, and longing for affection. V and I visited during Christmas break, and sure enough, she’d found another boyfriend. My heart sank like a rock. My worst fear came to pass, and I had preemptively taken away her say in the matter. <thud>.

Of course during high school there were plenty of people I’d had crushes on. I was unable to initiate any kind of connection with anything resembling grace or success with anyone save V the whole time. And it wasn’t for lack of trying. I got shot down 22 times in two weeks looking for a prom date. I remember a conversation with someone on the cross country team who must have seen me on the edge of distraught and asked me what was up. When I told her, she was blown away; the sense I got was that her respect for me went up two notches for being so persistent and determined, and staying with it through so much. Which struck me as odd at the time; I wasn’t aware such a response to pain I was experiencing was possible. But there it was. And I felt relieved, a little bit, to let it out and be seen in that moment.

I did end up finding a date for prom; a friend from my church group who I had no romantic interest in at all. Someone safe. We had fun swing dancing to early 90’s music (this was before the swing craze hit big).

I read someone once celebrating that they were a late bloomer, because they had missed out on a lot of bad sex. While maybe? probably? possibly? true, I’ll never know. There are more desirable ways to miss out on bad sex than being completely incapacitated every time it surfaces.

Next Up: College Try Becomes College Fail